


wonder under summer sky

by singsongsung



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:53:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23754913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: He’s wandering across the wooden deck of a boat set inside the museum when he hears something that sounds almost like his name. He glances to his left, certain he’s mistaken, but then he hears it again, “Laurie!” followed by another, even more enthusiastic exclamation, “Laurie!”Turning, he finds several patrons with sour expressions, clearly displeased that their quiet progression through the museum has been disrupted - and Amy March, half-running up the ramp that leads onto the ship, coming into focus just in time for him to catch her as she flings her arms around him.-Laurie, Amy, two cases of imposter syndrome, and a chance meeting in Zurich.Modern AU.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Amy March
Comments: 125
Kudos: 440





	1. zurich

**Author's Note:**

> A huge, huge thank you to sullypants for listening to me blather on about my modern AU idea, providing thoughtful advice and suggestions, and reading this over for me. 
> 
> Epigraph inspired by tumblr user iwillmp3 who made a post of Maggie Rogers' lyrics & stills of Amy and Laurie from the 2019 film which gave me All The Feelings. 
> 
> Title from Harry Styles' "Adore You."
> 
> I can't go to Zurich this year, so Laurie and Amy are doing it for me. I hope, reader, that you are staying safe & well wherever in the world you might be.

_came in like a vision from the old west wind_  
_like a bright new dream that i was stepping in_  
_i saw your face and i knew it was a sign_  
_and i still think about that moment all of the time_  
\- maggie rogers, “love you for a long time”

There is a heaviness to Laurie’s shoulders as he wanders through the Swiss National Museum, taking in exhibits with a degree of passivity, only stopping to read objects’ accompanying information placards every now and again. It’s a heaviness he’s been carrying for some time, and he’s beginning to wonder if he’ll carry it forever. He used to be so carefree, so lighthearted, that it felt like that weightlessness permeated his body, too, like his feet were always a quarter inch away from brushing the ground, like he was always just out of reach of those ubiquitous hands that always managed to sink their claws into people, to pull them down into mud they’d have to fight through for the rest of their lives.

The heaviness took root when he was twenty years old, when he told the girl he’d loved for five years but never once even kissed that he wanted to marry her. He was visiting her in New York City, and he’d spent all of Friday evening and the entirety of Saturday appreciating how it suited her. She had started walking like a New Yorker, with purpose and impatience, the messy bun atop her head held perilously in place with two pens, her fingers locked around his wrist so that she wouldn’t lose him in the crowd. She wore his cardigan around all day and he just had to tell her, that night, the two of them squashed together in her single bed watching _All the President’s Men_ on her temperamental laptop: _Jo, I want to marry you._

And she’d shaken her head so vehemently, nearly crawled up the wall with her desire to get away from him and from the conversation he’d started, said, _Oh, Teddy, don’t do this._

His buoyancy was altered, seemingly forever, that day in Jo’s dorm room. He saw her a couple times over the subsequent summers, and at every Christmas, and when he moved to New York to do his graduate degree they managed to find new footing for their friendship, but that airy irreverence that once carried him through life was gone forever.

He’s wandering across the wooden deck of a boat set inside the museum when he hears something that sounds almost like his name. He glances to his left, certain he’s mistaken, but then he hears it again, “Laurie!” followed by another, even more enthusiastic exclamation, “ _Laurie!_ ”

Turning, he finds several patrons with sour expressions, clearly displeased that their quiet progression through the museum has been disrupted - and Amy March, half-running up the ramp that leads onto the ship, coming into focus just in time for him to catch her as she flings her arms around him. Arms folded tightly around her waist, he holds her in the air for an instant, their bodies pressed close, before he sets her down.

“ _Amy_ ,” he says, his hands on her forearms. He can feel a grin spreading across his face. “What are you doing here?” he asks as he looks her over, taking in her chambray sundress, short enough to show off summer-tanned legs, and her feet ( _the best in the family_ , she’d once told him, swanning in from ballet lessons), toenails painted and on display in a pair of heels that look like they’re made of straw.

She beams at him, her own hands squeezing his arms. “I’m doing a summer semester at the art school. Jo didn’t tell you?”

Laurie shakes his head; he hasn’t spoken to Jo in a couple weeks. “We keep missing each other lately.”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Amy asks him. Laurie could easily spend an hour examining her smile: it has the same cheek in it he recognizes from years ago, but it’s different, too, infused with something more cultivated. She tilts her head. “Are you chasing some girl around Europe?”

“No,” he says, the stretched-out corners of his smile pulling inward. His bed hasn’t been cold since Jo turned him down, but he has yet to commit to a relationship. “No. I’m taking a year to travel - you know, backpacking around. I was in Berlin a couple weeks ago.”

Amy’s eyes soften. They say so much with their faces, the March girls - it’s something he’s always adored about them. “Oh, Laurie,” she says, teasing, “Don’t tell me you’re trying to find yourself.”

He nods, mock-somber. “Alright. I won’t tell you.”

She laughs, high and sweet and crisp, drawing a few more dirty looks. “I can’t believe this. It’s so good to see you.”

“You too.” He touches one of the braids brushing against her bare shoulder. “I see you’re embracing your inner Heidi.”

“When in Zurich,” she says with a shrug. “Are you staying close to here?”

“Yeah, just… “ He points vaguely to the right. “That way, I think.”

“I’m with my friends,” she says, and he spots two girls several feet behind her, regarding him curiously, “and we have dinner plans, but maybe we could hang out tomorrow, if you’re free? Catch up?”

“That’d be great,” he says sincerely. He’d come to Europe feeling crushed by the uncertainty of his future; he wanted to get away from everyone who’s ever known him and all of their expectations. Now, though, with Amy in front of him, he feels an acute burst of the homesickness he’s been studiously trying to repress. She feels like a gift he doesn’t deserve.

“Are you using WhatsApp here?” she asks, and holds out her hand. “I’ll give you my number.”

Laurie gives her his phone and she starts typing away with nimble fingers. He can’t stop looking at her, can’t get over the poised set of her shoulders, the line of her jaw and the lift of her chin. Gone is the girl who edged her way into his memories the same way she barged into her sisters’ bedrooms, begged to tag along to their parties, invited herself on their outings. The woman standing in front of him is just that: a woman. He last saw her six months ago, over the holidays; she’d opened the door of her family’s home to him wearing a onesie designed to make her look like a polar bear and a mud mask. The mask cracked when she smiled at him, and she was just Amy, the baby, curled up on the living room rug while the family watched _It’s a Wonderful Life._

But now - sometime, when he hadn’t been watching, Amy March grew up.

She returns his phone. “Would tomorrow afternoon work? Maybe… three o’clock?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Should we meet here again? By the front entrance?”

“Sure,” she says brightly, and then pokes him in the chest. “You’ve got my number. Text me if you’re going to flake.”

“When have I _ever_ \- ” he begins, affronted, but she just gives him a dimpling smile and whirls around in a blur of blue, making her way back to her friends.

True to her word, Amy’s waiting for him at three p.m. the next day, her hair gathered into a ponytail and her head bent over her phone. The afternoon is blisteringly hot, and even as it grows later, the heat shows no sign of abating. Laurie’s already developing a faint tan line atop his feet along the edges of his boat shoes.

“Hey,” he greets her, flexing and curling his fingers against the small of her back, scrunching the fabric of her coral-coloured dress lightly, the same way he used to when he was slipping past her in the upstairs hallway in the Marches’ house, or squeezing by her in their kitchen.

“Laurie, hey,” she replies brightly, slinging one arm around his neck in half a hug. Her other hand is full of a mess of things balanced carefully in her hold: her cell phone, headphones, a scrap of paper, a tube of mascara, sunglasses. “Could you take these for a sec?” she asks, referring to the sunglasses, and once he’s extracted them from her grip she gets to work sliding everything else into her small bag.

“No one really calls me that anymore,” he says as he watches her perform a quick, intricate game of tetris until she can zip the bag closed. “Everyone at Tisch called me Theo.”

Amy looks up at him. “Should I call you Theo?”

He slides her sunglasses onto his face; she laughs at the sight of her cat-eye frames resting on his nose. “You should call me whatever you want.”

“Do you want to walk through Old Town?” she asks him, and he notices as she moves that there’s a smattering of white paint along one side of her dress.

“Sure,” Laurie says easily, falling into step with her as she leads the way. “So, how’s your family?”

“Oh, good. Meg’s a little worn out, I think - she says she’s never going to be pregnant in the summer again. I hope I’ll get home before the babies are born. And Jo’s good; I’m sure you know all about the piece she just had published in _The Atlantic_. Oh!” She grabs his arm. “Bethie’s moving to Montreal! Can you believe that?”

Laurie grins. Only Beth’s baby sister can still get away with _Bethie_. “What’s she going to do there?”

“She got a job as a music therapist. I think she’ll love it. And Mom and Dad are the same as ever. With Beth leaving I think they’re really starting to feel the empty nest. Daddy keeps talking about getting a dog.”

“How’s that make you feel?” he asks teasingly. “Replaced?”

“Laurie,” she chides with a cluck of her tongue, taking her sunglasses off his face. “I’m irreplaceable.”

And it’s Amy as he’s always known her, almost outrageous in her self-assurance, but just like her old cheeky smile has changed, this part of her has, too, cynicism smoothing out her brashness.

“No one would dare think otherwise, Ames,” he says and he catches a glimpse of something delicate and subdued in her eyes before she slips her sunglasses on over them.

“How’s your grandfather?” she asks as they make their way onto a bridge. The water of the Limmat is dazzling under the sun, throwing up bursts of light, swans gliding across it serenely. Amy sets a slow pace as they wander across it that Laurie’s only eager to adopt.

“He’s well,” he tells her. “The pacemaker seems to be doing its job.”

“Good.” Amy slows down so much she nearly comes to a stop. “You worry about him?” she guesses softly.

“Yeah. Of course.” Laurie pushes a hand through his hair and then regrets it when he feels the sweat on his brow. “But he doesn’t like to be worried about.”

Amy leans against the bridge’s stone wall. “Worry comes with love,” she says. “There’s no separating them.”

Laurie considers her, cocking his head to one side. “Where did you learn that, Miss March?” he asks, carelessly curious. “I hope you haven’t fallen in love with some Swiss man who intends to whisk you away to his chalet.”

“No,” she says on a laugh. “But what would be so terrible about that?”

“Well…” It takes him a moment to hone in on an answer, a moment during which he can’t figure out why he said that to her, why he started with _I hope._ “You’d be missed at home. Think of how many dogs your parents would need to get to fill the void.”

Amy laughs again, and he’s certain she’s rolling her eyes behind the dark lenses. “It’s so hot,” she says, pushing away from the wall. “Come on, let’s go find shade.”

They wander up and down and across and over cobblestone streets, peering up at elaborate fountains and into shop windows, pointing out richly decorated cakes, squinting at the price tags on expensive watches, daring one another to try on grandiose hats. Boats slide by whenever they end up near the water again; glasses and silverware clink on restaurant patios. Laurie feels like he’s been plucked from his real life and set gently into a film, like he's witnessing a cinematic world from the inside. He trails Amy through an art shop and watches her flip carefully through prints of paintings, her face contemplative, lips pursed and eyes dissecting, and it feels nothing short of miraculous when he extends a hand toward the prints to hold the ones she’s flipped through already in place and his pinkie finger brushes hers; it feels nothing short of astonishing that she’s there, that she’s real, and that he’s with her.

“Let’s get a drink?” she proposes when they leave the art shop, side-stepping around a crowd of tourists in the street. Laurie is sweating and also basking in the liberation of a late afternoon with no schedule to follow and no demands to be met; he’s craving a glass of water and a pint equally. They make their way down toward the water again to look for a restaurant.

Settled at a table with a streak of sun across it, Amy gives the menu a cursory look and asks him, “Have you had Appenzeller yet?” When he shakes his head, she says, “Oh, you _have_ to. We’ll get shots. It’s a bit like Jäger.”

Laurie lets his eyebrows climb high on his forehead. “Amy March,” he says, mimicking Meg lightly, “when did you, not being of drinking age in our homeland, have Jägermeister?”

She quirks her own eyebrows at him, scrunching up her nose. When their waiter arrives she orders in stilted German: Appenzeller for them both, Chardonnay for herself. Laurie asks for whatever beer is on tap.

Amy pushes her sunglasses up atop her head and rests her chin in her hand, elbow propped on the table, looking out over the Limmat. “Don’t you find it so beautiful here?” she asks softly, wistful.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he agrees. The thin strap of her dress is twisted across her shoulder, and for half a second he contemplates smoothing it out. It shouldn’t be a strange thing to do - he’s seen Amy in the oversized t-shirts she used to sleep in, in leotards for ballet class, in her cheerleading uniform with that flippy skirt designed to give glimpses of the tight shorts underneath, in bathing suits each summer, and he’s touched her in those clothes (tug of a pigtail in the morning when she was still sleepy-eyed, a hand grasped to twirl the prima ballerina under his arm, her body colliding with his in a rented boat when Jo made a sudden, sharp turn on the water) without a second thought. There’s no good reason not to touch Amy’s shoulder, but still: he can’t quite bring himself to do it. It feels too different here, without the background bustle of all her sisters, with the sun so vivid on the water, with little Amy March ordering him shots of liqueur.

“Laurie?” she asks, and he blinks at her, wondering if she’s been talking to him this entire time.

“Sorry,” he says. “I might have a little bit of heatstroke.”

She frowns and lifts her glass of iced water, holding it against his cheek. It startles him, but it feels good, so he doesn’t move away. “Maybe we should’ve stopped walking sooner.”

“I’m fine,” Laurie assures her, letting her hold the cool glass to his skin for another few seconds before taking her wrist, guiding her hand down and the glass back to the table. “Thank you.”

“Drink something, at least,” she says, pushing his own glass of water toward him.

He takes an obedient sip, eyeing her over the glass’ rim. “You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

Amy smiles, warm and easy. Wisps of hair have escaped from her ponytail and are sticking to her neck. “Very,” she says.

Laurie waits until their waiter has delivered their drinks - Amy says, “Danke!” with a flirtatious smile the waiter’s all too happy to return - before he asks her another question: “Why don’t you stay?”

“I’m just here on exchange,” she says. “I’m still enrolled at Rutgers.”

“But you could transfer, couldn’t you? Finish your degree here?”

She rolls her lips together, her eyes suddenly somber, darker despite the sun. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because… because of what you said. My family would miss me. And I’d miss them. Very much.”

He looks at her fingers, which are curled tightly around the stem of her wine glass. “It wouldn’t be for too long, though, would it? Just until you earned your BA?”

Amy shrugs, realizes as she does so that the strap of her dress is twisted, and fixes it. “Hey,” she says, glossing over his moderate interrogation. She lifts her shot of Appenzeller. “To Switzerland.”

“To Switzerland,” Laurie agrees, tapping his glass against hers, and tips the alcohol into his mouth.

They resume their walk after they’ve had their drinks (Amy, being her mother’s daughter, insists that he drink two full glasses of water and then scrutinizes him carefully before she’s willing to let him get up from the table), at an even more leisurely pace. They stick close to the water, watching the swans. 

“Have you painted this place?” Laurie asks, and Amy nods.

“Not well, though,” she says. “I haven’t gotten it right yet.”

Laurie smiles faintly; he recognizes that kind of self-criticism. “What have you missed?”

“I’ll know when I find it, I think,” she says, and sighs as they slow to a stop at a traffic light, a tempered version of the pout she’d perfected in her early teens taking up residence on her lips.

“What is it?” he asks, smile shifting into an indulgent smirk.

“I have to pee,” she says, sounding irked, like it’s the greatest inconvenience she could imagine. She glances around, looking for a place where she might find a washroom.

“We’re not far from my hotel,” he tells her. “Should we just go there?”

“Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”

They cross the Limmat again, their footsteps in sync, while Amy asks him questions about Berlin. She’s so wrapped up in telling him about the KW Institute, which Laurie failed to visit but apparently _needed_ to see, that she almost walks right past his hotel, and he has to catch her elbow to stop her momentum. Amy looks at him, then at the doors to the hotel, and then back at him again, her eyes round with disbelief.

“You said you were _backpacking_!” she says, smacking him lightly on the shoulder. “Do you even know what backpacking _is_?”

“I do _have_ a backpack,” he says, guiding her inside.

“Wow,” she says in a hushed voice, taking in the lobby’s modern furniture and minimalist decoration. “Can I see your room?”

“Of course,” he says, and steers her toward the stairs.

“ _Backpacking_ ,” she murmurs incredulously when they step into his room. She kicks off her shoes and hurries off to the bathroom; Laurie uses her absence to shove a couple discarded pairs of underwear into his suitcase and to make a lame attempt at organizing all the things he’s been tossing on the dresser, maps and snack wrappers and a crumpled list of restaurants his grandfather told him to try.

“The bathtub in there is _huge_ ,” Amy reports when she returns to the main room.

“But look,” Laurie tells her with a grin, pointing to his backpack sitting on an armchair.

Amy scoffs at him, but she’s smiling. “You’re such a rich kid,” she says, not unkindly, wandering over to the window and taking in his room’s view of the river.

“But I’m willing to share the spoils,” he says, popping open the mini fridge and taking out two small bottles of gin, holding them up for her consideration.

She shakes her head. “I’ve got to eat something before I drink any more.”

“In _that_ case…” Laurie goes to the desk, opens a drawer, and pulls out a slim binder. “Room service?”

Her eyes light up. “ _Hell_ yes,” she says, accepting the menu from him and flopping down unselfconsciously on the foot of his unmade bed, one leg tucked beneath her. Laurie joins her, leaning back on his elbows, his heat-induced exhaustion catching up with him.

“Lady’s choice,” he says.

Amy smiles over her shoulder at him, the apples of her cheeks freckled by sunbeams.

Amy narrows it down to five dishes she wants to try, and Laurie orders them all, along with a bottle of cabernet. They eat in his bed, leaning back against the pillows, trays spread out over the white duvet and Amy’s legs tucked beneath it. The only English-language channel they can find on the TV is playing, of all things, _Planet of the Apes_ ; they leave it on with the volume down low, glancing at the screen only occasionally, spending most of their time talking. The pillows are plush against Laurie’s back, but it’s Amy, the inner part of her lips stained red, reaching over with her fork to pierce the olives he keeps shoving to the side of his plate and pop them in her mouth, that makes him feel like he’s found a safe place to land.

He left New York feeling a twitchy, reckless need to _move_ , to _go_ , to get away, far away, so that he would not have to look at his diplomas or into his grandfather’s eyes or at Jo March’s name on a byline and take stock of himself and his life. He’s enjoying his time in Europe, and he’s found it comforting that the next place, the next move, is never far away, just the quick purchase of a plane or train ticket, but this - this is a whole different kind of comfortable, a kind that engulfs him without ensnaring him. He’s missed this, though he hasn’t realized it until now.

Amy’s hand over her mouth as she laughs so that he doesn’t see her half-chewed food, Amy’s toes moving absently beneath the sheets, Amy’s gentle badgering to read the screenplay he had to write to graduate from Tisch, her gestures both known and unknown, her voice familiar and new, these things wrap around him like one of the blankets Marmee used to leave folded neatly across the back of the sofa. He’s reminded of an Easter weekend back in Concord after Jo rejected him; she’d stayed in New York, and John and Meg were at a B&B somewhere, but Beth and Amy had made every effort to remind him that he was still welcome, still an honorary March. They’d picked a Robert Eggers film to watch with him because they knew he would like it, and Beth cancelled the piano lesson she was supposed to give and Amy ditched cheerleading practice, and they sat down on either side of him to watch the movie, Amy curling into his side when the ominous music grew too much for her to bear, tossing popcorn over them both when she was startled. He’d thanked Beth when he left, but he can’t remember if he’d thanked Amy.

“That’s why you won’t let me read your script, isn’t it?” Amy asks as the credits roll across the screen. “Because it just doesn’t live up to _Planet of the Apes_.”

“You’ve figured me out, Ames,” he says, lifting the bottle of wine off the bedside table. “More?”

She nods, holding her glass out to him.

“Your ability to hold your liquor’s really improved, you know,” he says as he fills her glass and then empties the dregs of the bottle into his own.

Amy tsks at the fact that he has less wine than her. “Don’t start,” she says, taking his glass and gingerly pouring into it from her glass until they’re about equally full.

“I’m not starting anything,” Laurie says, all innocence. “Your efforts to climb into that window were _extremely_ subtle and not at all loud - ”

“How was I supposed to know you were sleeping on the couch!?”

“I could’ve killed you; I thought you were a burglar.”

“Yeah, that pillow you threw at me did serious damage.”

“You fell over.”

“I was _drunk_ ,” she says, laughter bubbling over. She turns onto her side, facing him, her cheek pressed into a pillow and the base of her wine glass resting against the mattress.

“And Justin Carr hadn’t kissed you at midnight.”

“It was my first New Year’s Eve party,” she says, her voice softer now. “I had high hopes.” Her eyes meet his. “I can’t believe you remember that kid’s name.”

“’Course I do. I listened to you talk about him for about a year.”

“You did not. You were in Vermont.”

“I listened to you talk about him for the entire winter break,” Laurie says, taking her point. “Whatever happened to good old Justin?”

“Who knows,” Amy sighs, and Laurie feels nonsensically pleased by the carelessness of her answer. “Oh, Laurie!” She lifts herself up on an elbow, and points to the television, which is now playing the start of a new movie. “ _Say Anything_!”

He smiles, stifling the urge to reach out and tuck a loose lock of her hair back behind her ear. “Should I order more wine?”

Amy thinks it over and decides, “No. More ice cream, though. And get the whipped cream again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says easily, and reaches for the house phone.

By the time _Say Anything_ ends, they’ve both sunk into the bed. Laurie’s stretched out, arms folded behind his head, and Amy’s basically burrowed into the pillows, the duvet pulled up to her chin. Neither of them move for several minutes, then Amy pushes back the duvet and sighs.

“I should go,” she says. Her voice is a couple notes deeper, heavy with sleepiness.

Laurie hauls himself into a sitting position, his limbs reluctant to move. “Where are you staying?”

Amy stifles a yawn. “A guest haus not far from school.”

“How’ll you get there?” he asks, rubbing at his hair, which is undoubtedly a mess. Amy’s hair is curling against her shoulders, the elastic that’d been holding her ponytail together lost somewhere in the sheets.

“ZVV,” she says. “There’s a night network.”

“Is that safe?” Laurie asks. “I’ll come with you.”

“No, Laurie - ” she starts, a small frown forming on her lips.

“At least let me call you a taxi, or - or just stay here.”

She pauses halfway out of the bed, a bare knee poking out from the blankets. “Stay here?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then, “ _yeah_ ,” more firmly, his tired mind managing to integrate his spontaneous suggestion. “I can sleep on the floor, if you want, or in that chair…?”

“No, don’t - don’t be silly,” she says, though she doesn’t appear entirely convinced.

He pushes the blankets down; Amy automatically tugs the hem of her dress down from where it’s ridden up high on her thighs. “This is technically two beds,” he tells her, nodding to the middle of the bed, where two mattresses are pushed together.

“Okay,” she says slowly. “If you’re sure.”

“Sure, I’m sure,” Laurie says, getting to his feet. “I’ll get you something to sleep in.”

“Thanks.”

He rummages around in his suitcase and pulls out a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, which he hands to her. She goes off to the washroom, and he corrals all their dishes back onto trays and sets the trays just outside the room’s door. He can hear water running when he’s done, so he changes quickly; he usually sleeps in just his underwear, but he adds a t-shirt in an effort to make Amy more comfortable.

She emerges from the bathroom swallowed up by the t-shirt and boxers he’s given her, and it sends a pulse of something through Laurie, like _he’s_ draped all over her, not just his clothes. He tries to shake it off, fixing his eyes on her face, where he spots two shadowy smudges beneath her eyes that weren’t there before, presumably from her attempts to remove her makeup with only water.

“Don’t make fun,” she says when she catches him looking, crawling onto the bed on her hands and knees like a child.

“I didn’t say anything,” he protests, settling onto the furthermost edge of his side of the bed while she gets under the covers on the opposite side.

“You were _thinking_ something,” Amy says, so knowingly that it almost unnerves him, but then she just presses down one of the pillows between their heads so that she can see him and says, “Night, Laurie.”

He’s got a memory of her saying those exact same words, hanging over the banister of her family home while he and Jo went off somewhere, _night, Laurie_ , eyes mournful because she’d wanted to come too, floral-printed pyjamas. But for some reason he can’t reconcile the girl in that memory with the girl across his bed, eyes full of a depth he can’t quite dig into, the sleeve of his own t-shirt bunching up around her shoulder.

He reaches over the flick off the bedside lamp and tells her, “Goodnight.”

Several hours later, Laurie wakes up far from the edge of the bed where he’d begun his night. He feels warm, and he realizes as he slowly surfaces from sleep that his warmth is the result of body heat. Amy’s body heat, to be precise.

He’s moved all the way to her side of the bed, and he’s wrapped around her: an arm across her middle, just below her breasts; his face pressed into her neck, her hair tickling his nose; one of her calves half-tucked between his legs. She’s breathing steadily, evenly, her fingers against his forearm.

It takes an unreasonable amount of focus not to allow himself to be distracted by the scent of her hair - almonds, maybe - or the smooth skin of her leg or, worst of all, the weight of her breast against his wrist. He concentrates instead on detangling himself from her, slowly easing his arm away and wincing as her fingers fall atop the blankets, cautiously shifting his weight and pulling his legs back.

Amy shifts, and he freezes. He holds his breath for a moment, hoping she’ll stay asleep, but he can feel it when she wakes up, the change in the cadence of her breathing, the ripple of surprise in her muscles when she realizes that his body is tucked around hers. No longer attempting to leave her undisturbed, Laurie pulls his arm back entirely and moves back across the space where the mattresses touch to his side of the bed.

She rolls over onto her back with a sleepy _mmph_ and looks at him with drowsy eyes. Laurie knows he should apologize, but _sorry_ gets stuck in his throat and won’t come out of his mouth.

“Morning,” she murmurs.

“Morning,” he replies, his own voice hoarse from slumber.

She rubs at one of her eyes, at her cheek, and then drops her hand, fingers tugging absently at the neck of his t-shirt. He can see the soft outlines of her breasts through the fabric, but he’s not looking, he’s not.

“You can sleep more,” he tells her quietly, watching her blink slowly at the ceiling.

“I can’t,” she says forlornly, stretching her arms up above her head. “I’ve got classes. I need to get back and change.”

Laurie nods. “I can order you breakfast,” he offers.

“No, that’s okay.” She sits up, drops her legs over the side of the bed. “I usually get coffee and a croissant on the way in.” She grabs her clothes from the previous day and disappears into the bathroom.

He stays where he is, in bed, trying to figure out why it had seemed so impossible to say, _hey, Amy, sorry I spooned you_. He gets absolutely nowhere before Amy exits the washroom, looking about the same as she did the day before, plus a few wrinkles in her dress, minus most of her makeup.

“Thanks for these,” she says, setting his clothes at the foot of the bed. “And for letting me crash.”

“No problem,” he says, finally hauling his body upright. “Sorry I didn’t find time to show you the piano bar.”

Amy gapes at him with a mixture of delight and disbelief. “You need to look up backpacking in a _dictionary_ , Theodore.”

He smiles widely, happy to be back in well-worn territory with her. “Come back tonight,” he proposes. “We can have a drink there.”

“Okay,” she says without reluctance. As she pulls the strap of her purse over her head and across her body, she seems to think through her day’s schedule. “Seven...thirty?”

“Perfect,” he says simply.

“Meet you in the lobby?” When he nods, she does, too, and leans in to stamp a kiss against his cheek. “See you.”

“See you,” he echoes, and for some reason watches her make her way down the hallway to the stairs. It’s stupid, misguided chivalry, he tells himself. There’s no other reason for him to want to look at her for just a moment longer.

When Laurie half-jogs down the stairs in the evening, he finds Amy in the lobby, where she said she’d be, studying the decor with mild interest. She’s wearing another dress, but a more formal one this time, its hem brushing her knees and a series of tiny pearl buttons down its back. She seems lost in thought; she doesn’t notice Laurie arriving at her shoulder, so he extends a hand in front of her with exaggerated ceremony.

“My lady,” he says softly, so as not to startle her.

Still, she blinks hard, pulled from the reverie she’d strayed into. Her eyes settle on his face and she asks, quietly, “You remember that?” before she rests her palm atop his.

“Of course,” he says, bringing their hands down to their sides and tugging her in the direction of the bar. “Who could forget your dramatics?”

(At twelve Amy decided she was going to embark on her very last round of trick-or-treating, and because it was _the last time ever_ , she needed an elaborate costume worthy of the occasion; she dressed up as a princess, or maybe a duchess, from a book she loved, in a medieval-looking gown with intricate details painstakingly stitched by Meg, and set a plastic tiara in her hair.

Most of her friends lived in a different neighbourhood - Laurie’s neighbourhood - and Marmee and Mr. March weren’t convinced Amy was old enough to go out on her own. Jo wanted to go for a walk to see the Halloween decorations at their spookiest, and Laurie wanted to go wherever Jo went, so the two of them ended up trailing Amy up and down streets filled with costumed children and patient parents.

Only two blocks away from the March house, they ran into a group of boys in Amy’s grade, one of whom pushed her - probably harder than he’d meant to, but the end result was that he shoved her into a muddy puddle, ruining her dress, her sense of dignity, and any warmth she’d been able to preserve in late-October Massachusetts. Jo looked positively murderous, but Laurie’d held her back gently, kept her with him and with Amy, who was trying very hard to pretend that she hadn’t started to cry. He scooped up Amy, her scraped elbow, and her sopping dress, and carried her back home.

When he set her down on the towel Marmee laid over a section of the couch, she sniffled and said, in a tragically small voice, “Thank you.”

He wanted to save the night for her, in whatever way he could, so he bowed grandly, very low, one arm folded across his front and the other folded across his back. “You’re welcome, Lady Amy,” he told her, and she gave him a tiny smile in response.

Meg, hovering with the first aid kit and listening to Jo recount what had happened, adjusted the tiara in Amy’s hair and said, soothingly, “It was a stupid thing to do, but he might have pushed you because he likes you.”

Jo gathered breath to protest, but before she could get going, Amy said, sniffing again but with something more like disdain than sadness, “I’d never like a boy like that back.”

“And you shouldn’t, my lady,” Laurie said, still in his thespian voice. Amy managed another smile, a more genuine one, and he could sense, despite the way she was rolling her eyes, that Jo was pleased with the tone of his advice.)

Amy gives her head a shake, looking mortified. “God, I was such a brat.”

“No,” Laurie says, and off her look amends, “Well, sometimes. But you were brave that day. Your elbow was scraped up, but you didn’t even complain about it.”

“I was trying to be like Jo,” she says. There’s something in her voice he can’t pinpoint, something wry and weighty. Laurie says a quick _danke_ to the hostess who shows them to a table tucked into a corner. There are no chairs, only seating on the booth that lines the walls, so they end up right next to each other, perpendicular rather than parallel. Amy breathes out a sound that’s almost a laugh when she takes her seat and adds, “When I wasn’t angry with her, I was always trying to be like Jo.”

Laurie shifts around on his part of the booth, making a futile effort to arrange himself into a position where his knee isn’t pressed against hers. “What did Jo have that you didn’t?” he asks.

Amy looks at him for a long, long moment, her face solemn. Whatever she’s wearing on her lips has turned them raspberry-coloured and lush and it feels like something is crackling through the air, over their small table. Then she drops her gaze to her menu and shakes her head, and that energy, whatever it was, is gone as abruptly as it appeared. “Felt like everything, sometimes,” she murmurs, squinting at the German descriptions of drinks.

He toys with the edge of his menu, but he doesn’t look down at it. His throat feels strange and it seems critical, suddenly, that he tell her: “You weren’t like Jo, that day. Your bravery - you pulled it out of yourself. What you said about that kid who pushed you, the way you said it, that was you. And your… your magnanimity,” he says with a chuckle, because that’s really the only word for it, “that was all Amy. You gave me one of your KitKat bars like it was a reward.”

Her eyes flick back up to his face, her lashes heavy in a way that’s nearly beguiling. “Well,” she says, one corner of her mouth curling upward. “You did carry me home.”

Halfway through their cocktails and the cheese platter they’re sharing, Amy leans toward him and says, her voice pitched low, beneath the music, “Beth would _love_ this.”

Laurie nods; she certainly would. “You should ask her to visit you, before you leave.”

She laughs. “Beth, fly across an ocean by herself? No way.” She bites into a cracker. “There are so many things here I wish I could share with my sisters. And then there are things I’m happy to have to myself.”

He leans in a little closer to hear her better. “What do you wish you could share with them?”

“My favourite bakery. All the pastries just _melt_ in your mouth. You have to go.” A pause, then she suggests, “Maybe on the weekend, we could go together?”

“I’d love to,” he says. “It’s just - I’m actually supposed to be going to Milan tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she says, still holding her half-eaten cracker. She looks taken aback.

“Yeah. I’d stay longer, but I already booked the hotel, so… ”

“Right, of course.” Amy sets down her cracker. “Well. It was really good to run into you.”

“It was _excellent_ to run into you,” Laurie says, trying to catch her eyes with his, to keep them from sliding away. He watches the corners of her raspberry mouth compress and then says, on impulse: “Come with me.”

“What?” A startled laugh falls out of her mouth. “Yeah, right.”

“I mean it. I’m serious. Come with me.”

“I can’t! I can’t just - ”

“Sure you can,” he says earnestly. “You’ve always wanted to go to Italy. You used to talk about how much you wanted to paint in Rome - ”

“When I was a _kid_ , Laurie - ”

“I haven’t booked my train ticket yet,” he interrupts her, pulling out his phone. “I bet I could get one for you, too.”

“I have _classes_ ,” Amy says. “I can’t just - just _go to Italy_.”

Laurie pushes aside their drinks and slides his phone over the table toward her, two tickets from Zurich to Milan waiting on the screen to be purchased. “Come on, Ames,” he says, looking right into her eyes again. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

For several seconds she just stares at him, aghast. She opens her mouth and then closes it; begins to shake her head and then freezes. She looks at him, at his phone, and back at him again, her awestruck expression giving way to mischief, to daring.

Her hand darts out, and she presses _complete transaction_ on his phone.

Laurie grins, so widely it feels foolish. Amy looks astonished for a beat, and then she splutters, “I - I have to pack.”

“You have to pack,” Laurie agrees, his stupid grin refusing to subdue itself. “Better get to it.”

_tbc._


	2. milan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much to everyone who's left comments/kudos! I hope you enjoy this second and final installment. 
> 
> I'm on tumblr at rivervixens and am always, always down to talk about _Little Women_.

Laurie ushers Amy into the window seat on the train. She’s wearing a silk scarf tied into her hair as a headband, and he tugs lightly at one of the ends that trail against her shoulder as she slips past him. She shoots him a look, her mouth trying for a frown but her eyes alight.

She’s also wearing, for the first time since he’s seen her on this side of the Atlantic, shorts rather than a dress, denim ones that would’ve caused Marmee to sent her back upstairs to change, once upon a time. She watches the verdant landscape roll by as the train takes them south, her chin perched on her fist, and Laurie does his best to focus on the passing views rather than on the patches of shadow and sunlight that skim across her thighs.

Amy looks for all the world, to Laurie’s eyes, like the heroine of a film that might just earn laurels on its poster, the ribbon in her hair a kaleidoscope of colours, her profile both sharp and soft, her gaze expansive and seeking, ready for what will meet her when the train stops moving. She makes him think of a woman destined for something she has yet to discover, eager to reach uncharted territory but wary, too -

His mind whirs with possibilities, all the things such a heroine could uncover in the places she has yet to go. Amy falls asleep while they’re still in Switzerland, her forehead against the window, and Laurie pulls out his phone and starts jotting half-formed ideas down in his Notes app. It’s not anything, not really, but it feels a lot more authentic and far more inspired than the screenplay he’d forced himself to write back in New York, hating every word more than the last.

The sun dances along Amy’s legs, and when Laurie looks up again, they’re in Italy.

They take the metro to the hotel and check in. Amy shakes her head at Laurie as the desk agent records information from their passports, mouths, “ _Not. Backpacking,_ ” at him. He’s tempted to make a face at her, but the bellhop’s already whisked their bags away, so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He opts for a vaguely sheepish shrug instead, and Amy grins, bumping her hip against his.

The room he’s reserved is even more extravagant than his room in Zurich. Amy’s mouth drops open in childish wonderment as she stares up at the high ceilings, the ornate frames around every mirror, the bed’s austere mahogany headboard. “Laurie, holy _shit_ ,” she whispers, moving over to the window and pressing her fingertips against the unblemished glass. It pleases him unaccountably to see her fingerprints make their mark on the window, on the city.

Amy wraps herself into one of the heavy ivory drapes, twirling into it. “I feel like - like I’m in an Austen novel,” she says through a burst of awed laughter. “Mr. Laurence, would you like to add your name to my dance card?”

“At least twice,” he says, taking a moment of his own to observe the room. Its main area, with bed and table and cushioned chairs, is old-fashioned, but the renovation of the washroom seems to have involved a burst of modernism. Between the bedroom and the bathroom, there’s a pane of glass set within the wall - after glancing into the bathroom, he surmises that it's in the shower section, and that its upper edge is probably about the height of his shoulders. He guesses it’s probably meant to inspire intimacy, which wouldn’t have mattered at all if he was alone - but he’s not.

The bed is two mattresses again, so theoretically (assuming Laurie can get a hold of himself and stay on his side) they can sleep in separate spaces. But he thinks the bed _and_ the window into the shower might be too much, and he wonders if he should offer to get Amy her own room.

He turns back to her. She’s extracted herself from the curtains and is standing by the vanity table, her purse open atop it, applying lip balm. As she rubs her lips together, she meets his eyes in the mirror. Even from where he’s standing, several feet away, Laurie can pick up the faintest whiff of peach, the scent of her chapstick. The knowledge of what her mouth must taste like is so jarring that it renders him speechless.

Amy’s looked at the whole room. She hasn’t said anything about the bed, or the bathroom, which might mean that he doesn't need to, either. 

“What now?” she asks, hands tucked into her back pockets.

“We explore,” he says. “Maybe find something to eat?”

“Gelato,” Amy says immediately. “Fifteen pounds of gelato.”

Laurie snaps his fingers and points at her, a wordless way to say _brilliant idea_. “I knew there was a reason I had to bring you along,” he says, and catches the room key she tosses in his direction.

It’s not exactly fifteen pounds worth, but Amy does order a cone piled high with four different flavours of gelato, a sliver of chocolate embellishing its top scoop. It starts to drip almost immediately, and Laurie fails at stifling his laughter at how intensely miffed she looks, watching with what he hopes is passive interest as she sucks drops off her knuckles. He gives her both of the small napkins he was handed along with his cup of three flavours.

It’s hot in Milan, a different kind of heat than the sort he was growing accustomed to in Germany and Switzerland. The heat is full of humidity; it makes his shirt stick to his skin and causes his gelato to melt out of its neat scoops and into a diluted mixture. Amy giggles, looking triumphant, when he gets a smear of it on his chin. She swipes it off for him with the clean corner of a napkin.

Full of sugar, they walk several more blocks, and then by unspoken agreement, just the briefest exchange of glances, they turn and begin to retrace their steps to the hotel. As they make their way across an intersection, their hands bump together, two of Amy’s fingers sliding against his palm. She lifts her hand immediately to touch the knot in her scarf at the base of her skull, checking that it’s still secure. Laurie eyes her in a futile attempt to figure out if it shifted things, that simple, accidental brush of their hands. But when she looks at him a moment later the ease in her expression is unchanged, her smile sweet and smooth and smudged with chocolate at its corners.

“I’m happy I’m here,” she says, and some quixotic, long-dormant part of Laurie aches to say _me, too._

Back at the hotel, though it’s barely nine o’clock, Amy brushes her teeth, changes into cotton shorts and a camisole, and curls up on her side of the bed. Laurie feels bone-tired too, despite the fact that they hardly did anything with the day - there was a giddy sort of venturousness involved in getting on the train together, and when combined with the effects of the heat he has little energy left to speak of.

Amy drifts off in the midst of an idle conversation about the possibility of finding a restaurant that will serve them pizza first thing in the morning. Her hair falls across her face, strands floating upward oh-so-slightly every time she exhales and then settling back against her mouth and the nose she’s always happy to complain about.

Laurie’s eyes feel heavier as he listens to her deep breathing, but he stays awake for a bit longer, writing a quick e-mail to his grandfather’s travel agent. The work day is not quite over in Massachusetts, and he hopes to wake up to a response.

E-mail sent, he opens his Notes app again and reads his muddled thoughts from the train, peppered with the occasional typo. He thinks about Amy’s forehead against the train window, her fingertips against the pane of glass that stands between their hotel room and the city, her body pressing gently into the world, making an impact.

It’s early when Laurie stirs into wakefulness, thanks to the fact that he fell asleep before ten. He’s so incredibly comfortable sprawled on his stomach between the sheets that he briefly contemplates sleeping for a couple more hours, but he’s kept awake by the sensation of a hair in his mouth. He scowls, sputtering a little in an attempt to remove it, and reluctantly squints open his eyes.

It’s Amy’s hair, of course, hair that has an easy route to sneak into his mouth thanks to her temple pressed into his shoulder as she sleeps on her back. When he lifts his arm to try and pull the persistent hair off his tongue, he realizes that he had it thrown across her hips. He’d gone to bed with such resolve to stay on his own side, but his sleeping body betrayed him.

He manages to shuffle away from Amy without disturbing her. The edge of the sheet is caught between her thumb and forefinger, and he wonders what she’s holding onto in her dream.

Getting out of bed, Laurie decides to take a shower while she sleeps so that they won’t have to both awkwardly pretend to ignore the window between the rooms while he does so. He takes off his clothes in the bathroom, turns on the water, and steps under the lukewarm spray.

He can’t help but look toward the bed. Amy’s rolled onto her side, and her arm extends toward his pillow, her palm upright.

Laurie turns away and orders himself not to look again.

He’s dressed and drinking coffee in a chair by the window, his hair almost dry, when Amy murmurs, “Hi,” from under the duvet.

“Morning, sleeping beauty,” he says, a smile finding its way onto his mouth naturally. “I was beginning to think you were going to sleep all morning.”

She sits up, yawning into a fist. There are creases from the pillow across one of her cheeks, and her hair is charmingly disheveled. “You could’ve woken me up.”

“It’s your vacation,” he says with a shrug, moving toward the bed. Amy holds out both hands, and it takes him a second to clue into the fact that she wants his cup of coffee. It surprises him, but he hands it to her without hesitating.

She takes a long drink, her mouth puckering a little; he takes his coffee black and he knows she likes cream and sugar. “Does that mean I decide what we do today?”

“Sure,” Laurie says. “Or…” He picks up his phone from the table by the window and returns to the bed, sitting next to her. “We could do this,” he says, showing her the tickets the travel agent forwarded to him the previous night.

Her eyes move over the screen as she reads, and then they snap up to his face as she sucks in a breath. “The Last Supper?” At his nod, she asks, “ _How?_ I’ve heard you need to book those tickets weeks in advance. Months, sometimes!”

“Grandfather’s got a great travel agent,” he says. “We’re booked at 2:45, and we’ve got tickets to the rooftop of the Duomo beforehand. If you want.” He gives her a quick, teasing grin. “Unless you had better ideas for the day.”

“I can’t believe - of _course_ we’re doing this. I can’t believe you got tickets.”

Her happiness is so palpable that his chest swells in response. “If you want to get ready, I can make you your own cup of coffee.”

“I like yours,” she says, getting out of bed with it still in hand, her smile both dignified and silly, and Laurie doesn’t have it in him to argue.

There’s a dress code for the Duomo, so like Laurie, Amy puts on jeans, and then discovers, after taking absolutely everything out of her bag, that she hasn’t brought a single shirt that covers her shoulders. She borrows one of his button-down shirts, a blue one with a navy fleur-de-lis pattern, and ties its ends artfully so that the bottom of it meets the waistband of her jeans instead of hanging down over her thighs.

They climb a long, winding staircase, some of its steps uneven, up to the Duomo’s rooftop. It’s a small space, only big enough for a single-file march of tourists. There’s no way for Laurie to be anywhere but behind Amy, but still, she reaches back and takes his hand like she wants to be sure he stays there. It’s not a straightforward, amiable handhold, palm against palm and their fingers folded around one another’s, but rather a tangle of her fingers hooked between his, her thumb rolling over his knuckles.

At the top, there are spires and statues, gargoyles and intricate archways. Amy tilts her head back to take it all in, and Laurie presses a hand against her back, nonsensically concerned that she’s going to tip over backwards. She laughs at the gesture but doesn’t move away from the touch, and says, simply, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Laurie agrees, looking at the closest carved figure, whose expression looks somewhat tortured.

They walk over the rooftop, treading carefully over angled surfaces, moving around and through groups of people. They stop when they find an empty space by one of the short, carved walls that line the roof, and lean lightly against it, studying the way the sun bathes the city, peering into the distance and trying to spot the Alps between moving wisps of cloud.

“Imagine how much you have to care,” Amy says softly. “How much you have to… believe, and to feel, and to _trust_ , to build something like this.”

Laurie nods, pulling his gaze from the expanse of Milan spread out below them and settling his eyes on her face. “Are you having a religious awakening, Ames?” he asks, matching her soft tone, teasing her, but with kindness.

She rolls her eyes at him, biting her lower lip to quell a smile. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so, anyway. Just - ” She looks up again. “Don’t you feel like those spires are _reaching_ for something? I - I envy that. The… surety, in that reaching.” She breathes a laugh and leans a little closer to him as she asks, “Do that sound totally crazy?”

“No,” Laurie says, and he means it with everything in him. “No.”

They enter Santa Maria delle Grazie with exactly twenty-three other people, everyone hushed and expectant. The air is cooler inside, and Laurie doesn’t know if it’s the abrupt change in temperature that causes the hairs to raise on his arms, or the larger-than-life fresco in front of them.

He takes in the colours, the detail in the bodies and fabrics and faces, the pattern in the cloth laid over the table, and he turns to Amy, perhaps to echo her earlier _wow_.

He never manages it, though. Instead, the sight of her snatches the breath from his lungs. He’s known her since she was ten years old, but it’s like the first time he’s ever seen her, her eyes lifted to the fresco. He can see her passion for art, for creation, for a feeling laid out in line and colour and gifted to someone else. He can see how much love she has inside of her, running through her veins, how the desire to create that kind of gift with her own two hands throbs in all her heartbeats. He can see all the light that she carries, how it radiates out of her skin, and he can see the little pieces of darkness too, tucked away into the corners of her mouth, the bends behind her knees, the lines across her palms. He sees all her hope, her wanting, her ambition; he sees all her atonement, her trepidation, her nihilism. He sees the single strand of hair caught in her earring, sees the exquisite fragility of her eyelashes. He sees the splendor of her, how utterly gorgeous she is, and how observing she is, how deliberate.

And then she looks at him, and sees that he’s not looking at the painting, and jabs her elbow into his ribs to remind him to make use of the mere fifteen minutes they have in the room, and Laurie feels that jab go straight to his heart, penetrative and transformative.

In the square, back in the sweltering, sultry heat, Amy’s hands linger in the air in front of her torso, like she’s not sure what to do with them. She has yet to put her sunglasses on, and there’s so much on her face, so much in the furrow of her brows, the parting of her lips. Her head moves in a small, dazed shake, and then she stops walking suddenly, upsetting the paths of both people and pigeons.

Laurie touches her wrist, then slides his hand up over her forearm to her elbow, and then even further, along her upper arm to her shoulder. His shirt is clinging to her skin, and when he tugs her into a hug, the fabric along her back is damp from perspiration. Her face presses into his shoulder despite the fact that he’s also sweating profusely.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice muffled and small. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he tells her. His mouth finds its way to the top of her head, presses softly into her hair.

They eat more than their fill of pasta for dinner, split a bottle of wine, and walk back to the hotel while they share a cup of lemon gelato. Amy asked for her own little plastic paddle-spoon, which is good, because Laurie has a sincere yet surreal fear that watching her mouth close around the spoon he’s using would cause his brain to short-circuit.

She undoes the first couple buttons on her (his) shirt in the elevator and says, “God, I need a shower. You mind?” When he looks at her for a moment, uncomprehending, she clarifies, “Or did you want to shower? You’re probably faster, so you could go first.”

“Oh,” Laurie says. “No, no. You go ahead.”

She goes into the bathroom without a word about the pane of glass that she’ll be standing in front of momentarily, naked. Laurie figures she must trust him not ignore her, so he tries. He really does try.

But just like in the morning, when their positions were reversed, his willpower is far weaker than he’d like to admit. He looks, just for a second, and sees the tops of her tanned shoulders, catches sight of her lips moving as she sings softly, a song he can’t quite hear above the sound of the shower spray. Her arms raise to massage shampoo into her hair, and Laurie looks away quickly, the back of his neck burning.

He picks up a guidebook from the desk and stares at the pages determinedly, not really absorbing any of the words, merely flipping the pages when it feels like he’s looked at each one for long enough. He maintains some semblance of concentration until he hears a tapping, at which point he lifts his head, wondering if someone is knocking on the room’s door.

But it’s not a member of the housekeeping staff - it’s Amy, knuckles wrapping lightly on the glass between them, which is now slightly more opaque thanks to the steam from the shower’s hot water. She sketches a sloppy heart into the condensation with her index finger, then swipes it away with her palm and sticks her tongue out at him. It should be playful, harmless - he can’t see anything below her shoulders - but the heat that was previously only along the back of his neck feels like it’s spreading throughout his body.

The shower turns off, and he glues his eyes to a paragraph about Milan’s history.

Amy steps out of the bathroom in her pyjamas and a steamy cloud of scents: something nutty, something floral, something earthy. Her wet hair creates damp circles at the neckline of her camisole. She smiles at him, her face dewy and scrubbed pink, and Laurie smiles back helplessly.

“Are you tired?” she asks as she sits down on her side of the bed.

“Not really.” Laurie sets the guidebook aside. “You?”

“My body is,” she says. “Not my brain, though.”

He nods toward the television. “Want to see if we can find something to watch?”

She nods, too, picking up the remote and flicking the TV on. While she flips through channels, he goes to his bag and gets out a small box of chocolates he bought in Switzerland, which he sets in the middle of the bed as he takes a seat on his own side.

“We can’t possibly keep eating,” Amy says, but when he lifts the lid off the box she reaches out and picks up a truffle.

She leaves the television on a channel playing what appears to be a soap opera; the dialogue is, of course, in Italian, but the plot is somewhat discernible from the actors’ gesticulating and the dramatic music.

“I would never,” Amy murmurs in a melodramatic voice, as one of the characters weeps at her sister’s feet, “I would never sleep with your husband!”

Laurie grins, and watches the other character for a beat before he says, “And I - I would never murder _your_ husband as revenge.”

The character Amy’s creating dialogue for gasps then, almost perfectly on cue, and they both burst out laughing.

She runs a finger along the edge of the chocolate box rather than continuing to provide dialogue for the scene they’re constructing. Laurie watches her, sensing that her thoughts are drifting elsewhere. One section of her hair is drying into a perfect ringlet.

“Laurie…” she starts. Her tone is solemn and heartfelt; she folds her hands in her lap. “Thank you for today.”

He reaches over, sets a hand on her bare knee, and leaves it there just for a moment. “It was a good one,” he agrees, keeping his eyes on her face as the pink in her cheeks blooms and turns rosy.

Laurie is both annoyed with himself and unsurprised to open his eyes in the morning and discover that his body is firmly wrapped around Amy’s, one of his knees tucked up into the crook of hers, her ass against his groin and his arm looped around her like its found its new favourite place. Her fingers are slotted loosely through his.

He shifts his hips away from hers and goes to begin the process of detangling their hands when Amy mumbles something, drawing his arm more tightly around her and turning her face into the pillow with a contented sigh. He keeps still for a minute, wondering if it would pull her from sleep if he were to try and move away again. Before he can figure it out, his eyelids have grown too heavy to keep them from closing, and he’s falling back into a pleasant but undefined dream.

He’s jarred from sleep again at the sound of several chirps from Amy’s phone. She reaches out a hand, groping for it on the bedside table, and he withdraws his arm from around her and shuffles over on the bed, spared from the agony of having to try and nonchalantly detangle his limbs from hers.

She flops onto her back after she’s got her phone in hand, one eye half-open as she scrolls across its screen. “Groupchat with my sisters,” she explains in the raspy morning voice he’s beginning to recognize.

“Everything good?” he asks, the last word disappearing into a yawn.

“Yeah.” Her smile is tired but full. “Meg says she’s ‘still pregnant’... Jo’s spending the next couple weeks at a cabin upstate…” The corners of her smile shift downward as she scrolls up again. “She doesn’t say who she’s going with, but she can’t be going on her own, can she… ?” With a frustrated scrunch of her nose at her sister’s reticence, Amy moves on and tells him, “Bethie says Dad wants a goldendoodle and Marmee says not unless he’s doing all the training. They all say hi to you.”

“Did you tell them you’re playing hooky in Italy?”

“No,” she says, sounding almost shy. “I told them I ran into you at the museum.”

Laurie nods, and doesn’t ask any more questions. He doesn’t mind that she hasn’t told her family about their travels; in fact, he might actually be glad about it. He’s happy to keep this (Amy in his hotel bed, Amy doodling hearts in shower steam, Amy holding his hand all the way up a claustrophobic staircase) to themselves.

“Tell them I say hello back,” he says, pushing aside the blankets and setting his feet on the floor. “I’m going to shower, do you want to order breakfast?”

“Sure,” she says, typing away. Her hair is tangled and messy; one of her camisole’s straps is hanging down her arm. She’s so beautiful that closing the bathroom door at his back is an immense relief to Laurie, a temporary blockade to keep him from doing something stupid, like taking her face in his hands with the intention of kissing her.

When he leaves the bathroom, freshly showered and dressed, there’s a tray of breakfast food waiting for him, and Amy, who’s wearing her denim shorts again and holding her phone out to show him the screen. “I found this,” she says as Laurie quickly reads a page on a website about an area of the city famous for its street art. “Can we go?”

“Yeah. Looks fun.”

She nods, setting her phone down and digging her teeth into her bottom lip. “I tried to pay for breakfast,” she says, like she’s making a confession. “They wouldn’t let me do anything but charge it to the room.”

“That’s fine, Ames,” he says, picking up a pastry and biting into it.

“It’s just… ” Her shoulders shift beneath her shirt, and the edge of her bra peeks out from beneath its V-neck. “You’ve been paying for everything. The hotel, obviously, and our meals, and the tickets yesterday - ”

“I’d already paid for the hotel. And the food and the tickets - don’t worry about that.”

She still looks uncomfortable. “I know you have a lot more money than I do, but I’m not… _destitute_. I want to contribute.”

Laurie nods, taking a seat next to her at the foot of the bed. The question of money has been an undercurrent in his relationship with the Marches for years: he loves them and wants to spoil them, but sometimes he goes too far and leaves the sisters feeling awkward about their inability to reciprocate. He explained to Jo once, sitting on the steps of someone’s porch outside a high school party, that the March family has given him things - love, trust, belonging - that money cannot possibly buy, and that seemed to dilute a fair amount of the unspoken economic tension between them, but he supposes he probably should’ve understood how his leniency with his money looks to Amy, in this hotel room with all its opulence.

“I won’t take out my wallet at lunch today,” he offers, the flash of lacy pale blue bra still taunting him.

“And you won’t eat like a bird,” Amy says expectantly. “You’ll order everything you want.”

“As you wish, signorina,” he tells her formally.

“Okay,” she says, satisfied.

She stays at his side for an extra moment, her eyes working a trail across his face, down his neck and the strip of his chest left bare by his yet-to-be-buttoned shirt, over his legs and then to his hand resting against the mattress between their bodies. Her own hand drops off her leg but stays pressed close to her side, and then her fingers curl inward, finding purchase on the bottom hem of her shorts, and she pushes to her feet. “Good,” she adds, and sets to work spooning sugar into her coffee.

They take the metro to Isola. Amy’s eyes flit about, people-watching in a way that strikes Laurie as a match to the movement of Jo’s watchful gaze on the New York subway. She takes her peach lip balm out of her purse and rubs it over her lips, and when they’re standing so close its saccharine scent is the only thing he can smell, and the shine of her mouth from the balm is all he can see. She catches him staring and holds the little tube out in his direction, offers, “Want some?”

Laurie shakes his head, and back into her purse it goes.

They meander through the neighbourhood, looking at the art on sides of buildings, on the rolling metal doors that cover storefronts, under bridges. Amy snaps pictures, occasionally turning her camera in his direction. When Laurie tries to duck out of frame, she protests, “Stop. I want to remember this.”

For lunch, they choose a restaurant attached to a hipster-ish motorcycle shop, sitting on either side of a table in the shade. Laurie tells their server, “Grazie,” sincerely after butchering every word of his order, and then turns his attention to Amy, whose smile is easy and relaxed.

“Do you feel inspired to paint a wall?” he asks, watching her fingers trace lazy patterns in the moisture gathering on the outside of her glass of water.

“No,” she says on a soft laugh. “I don’t think I’d be very good at that.”

“Sure you would.”

“No, Laurie, I - ” She looks agitated suddenly, watching a pigeon stroll by. Her voice is pinched when she says, again, “I don’t think so.”

He watches her face, surprised to see its planes settling into something that looks like resignation. “What is it, Amy?” he asks quietly, flexing his fingers against the urge to reach for her hands.

She turns her face to his again, her eyes measuring, sizing him up - and apparently finding him worthy, because she sighs heavily but tells him, “Being here. Coming here. To Zurich, I mean. Being in this program with all these - my classmates are from all over the world, and they’re all so talented. They all have so much to say, and I… I feel like a fraud.” She blinks rapidly. “I’m not like them. I don’t make art like that.”

Laurie’s throat feels constricted by the magnitude of his empathy. Amy’s eyes are so despondent; he wishes he could find a way to brighten them again. “I felt that way all the time,” he tells her slowly. “At Tisch.”

She blinks - not against tears, this time, but against shock. “You did?”

“Every fucking day,” he says wryly. “I felt like the worst one there. Like a complete hack. Unoriginal.” He swallows. “Undeserving. Like… I’d bought my way in, not earned it.” He releases a sigh of his own, a sigh he’s been carrying for months. “I’m not cut out to be some amazing filmmaker. I don’t have it in me.”

Amy stares at him. He’s not sure what he’s expecting her to say, but it’s not what comes out of her mouth, which is: “But - but you haven’t even tried it yet.”

“I have. I wrote that shitty script - ”

“But you haven’t tried to turn it into a film, or to write something else.” She’s looking at him like he’s offended her. “You have the best possible education, Laurie. Your grandfather invested in that, invested in _you_. You at least have to try, not give up before you even begin!”

He examines her pretty face, the way her eyes have narrowed with annoyance. He keeps his voice mild as he asks, “And you don’t?”

“I _have_!” she says, with such passion that it startles them both. “I worked my way here. I worked to get into Rutgers, I worked so hard on my application to this program that I hardly slept for three days. I’ve _tried_.” She seems to deflate, then, her shoulders falling, and she sounds about five years younger when she says, “It just turns out that I’m not good enough.”

The silence that sits between them then is an aching one, pervaded by a sense of failure and the sting of realism. Laurie inches his feet toward Amy’s beneath the table until his ankle bone bumps against hers.

“I don’t think that’s true, Ames,” he says delicately.

She still looks like she wants to cry, the slightest quaver in her chin. “I want,” she says immovably, “to be great, or nothing.”

And Laurie tells her gently, truly meaning it: “I know.”

When they’ve finished eating they get coffee and then walk until their feet and calves are aching, at which point they get back on the metro. They get off close to a canal and, now that their feet have had a bit of a break, walk the length of one of its sides. Amy stops at a small shop and picks out a postcard for each of her sisters while Laurie stands patiently at her side, holding the sunglasses that fell off the top of her head, unnoticed, while she was concentrating on the selection of images. They cross a foot bridge to the canal’s other side, and when Amy tilts her head toward a restaurant giving off the delicious aroma of pizza, Laurie nods and follows her to a table.

The warmest hours of the day have technically passed, but the heat is still stifling. Amy reaches across the table while they wait for their food and picks up his sweating glass of beer, pressing it to her cheek and closing her eyes in her enjoyment of its coolness. Laurie forgets how to breathe for a minute. He picks up her glass of red wine and, using humour to attempt to break the tension that feels almost as thick as the humid air, holds it to his own cheek. Amy laughs when she opens her eyes and steals a sip of his beer before handing it back, and the waiter delivers their pizza.

“Let me read your screenplay,” she says earnestly once they’ve both taken a few ravenous bites and are sated enough to talk. Her voice is lighter than it was at lunch, and her tongue swipes tomato sauce off her bottom lip.

He sets down his slice, pretends to think, and then says, “Okay.” Enthusiasm beams across her face, so he’s quick to add, “If you come to Naples with me.”

“Laurie,” she tsks, frowning. She kicks his shin beneath the table. “Be serious.”

“I am,” he says, because he is. “I’m supposed to leave on Tuesday.”

“I can’t go to Naples. Skipping classes to come here was bad enough.”

He leans forward across the table, not caring if he gets cheese on his shirt. “So be bad, Amy,” he teases. “I know you want to.”

She rolls her eyes indulgently. “I’m being serious. I really am.”

“And I told you: so am I.”

“You’re incorrigible,” she says, sounding momentarily like her twelve-year-old self. “D’you know that?”

He sits back in his chair, spreading his arms out. “It’s all for you, Amy March.”

“Aren’t I a lucky girl,” she shoots back. There’s no mistaking her sarcasm, but Laurie doesn’t miss the way her expression doesn’t quite align with her the disapproval in her voice, the way she’s losing a fight against her sweetest smile, the brief glimpse of bashfulness in her downcast eyes.

He lifts his beer, a wordless toast.

The sunset streaks across the sky, deep yellow and orange and hints of crimson. Laurie and Amy keep walking, trading off who picks which direction they should go in when they hit an intersection. Once they’ve made a wide, somewhat circuitous loop of the area, they get back on the metro, heading in the direction of the hotel.

By the time they step outside again, it’s dusk. “Back to the hotel?” he asks Amy. “Or do you want gelato first?”

“You say that like I have an _addiction_ ,” she says, hip-checking him.

“I didn’t hear a no.”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response, saying instead, “Do you want to… walk for just a little longer?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says. The soles of his feet are screaming for rest, but he understands why she's asking. The day has felt expansive and endless, and he doesn’t want it to be over yet, either.

“Listen, Laurie,” she says as they walk in the opposite direction of their hotel, a sigh held within her words, “I’m sorry about what happened at lunch. About… yelling at you.”

“You didn’t yell,” he says with half a smile. “And you don’t need to be sorry.” He waits only a second before adding, “You were right.”

Her head practically whips in his direction; his acceptance has startled her. There’s no mistaking the glow of her grin, not even in the fading light. She says, simply, “I know.”

They take two left turns, their path taking them in the direction of the hotel once again. As they make their way down a street so narrow that a car would probably struggle to traverse it, their hands nudge together. This time, Laurie doesn’t let her pull away; instead, he takes Amy’s hand in his own, laces his fingers slowly and purposefully through hers.

Her footsteps slow, so his do, too, and eventually they come to a complete stop. Her eyes go to their hands and then travel up his arm, over his shoulder and neck, and finally rest on his face.

“Laurie,” she murmurs, his name in her mouth made gossamer by vulnerability.

“Amy,” he returns, squeezing her hand, trying to impart courage.

Her chin tilts up. Laurie moves in closer, and she doesn’t back away. He takes the hand that’s not intertwined with hers and touches her cheek. He dips his head, and he sees Amy’s eyelashes flutter before their mouths meet.

The kiss is soft but not without fire: a beginning, a first spark, ready to be stoked into something blazing. She tastes like artificial peach and _Amy_ , which Laurie’s tongue has yet to know but is keen to learn. Her fingertips skim along the buttons at the front of his shirt before her hand finds its way to his side, and then to his lower back, where it slips beneath his shirt and her palm makes contact with his skin. He feels greedy to touch more of her, too, so he slides the hand on her cheek down along her neck and lets his knuckles trace her collarbone before brushing lightly against the side of her breast. Amy presses up into him, up into his kiss, up into his touch, and the flame that they’re fueling burns harder and higher.

Laurie slips his hand out of hers and moves it to the small of her back, holding her body even more tightly to his. Her feet move and his follow suit, and then they’re off the cobblestones and onto a weedy patch of grass. He lifts his hand to cup the back of her head just before her body collides with the side of a building.

Amy nips at his lower lip, teasing with her teeth, and presses her shoulders back into the stone behind her, her hips pushing forward into his, and Laurie feels so overwhelmed by her that he only partially manages to stifle a grown. He slots his thigh between her legs and relishes the catch in her breathing and the way her hands move further under his shirt, her fingers splayed against his back.

He eases away the hand behind her head and slides it appreciatively down her body until he can hook it under her knee and stroke slowly up her thigh, right to the hem of her shorts. She rolls her hips down against the leg he’s got pressed against her, just barely, like she can’t help it. Laurie grins into the kiss and she bites at his lip again; he can almost hear her thinking _don’t make fun_ beneath her stuttered breathing. He brushes the thumb of his other hand over the neckline of her shirt and along the top of the cup of her bra before dipping beneath it, and when she gasps he uses the opportunity to drop his mouth to her neck and taste her soft, sun-soaked skin. One of her hands finds its way out from under his shirt and into his hair instead, fingers threading through strands, and she sighs, “ _Laurie_...” in a way that threatens to unravel him. He makes a quiet noise of agreement against her pulse point, and her hand clutches at his back to keep him close.

They only break apart because of the sound of approaching voices; two men have turned down the street, speaking jovially. Laurie moves his hand out of Amy’s bra and to her waist instead, but leaves his other hand on her thigh, fingers digging lightly into her skin in his effort to restrain himself.

Her hand falls from his hair, and she extracts the other hurriedly from beneath his shirt. Both of her hands hover in the air, suspended on either side of their bodies for a protracted moment. She curls her fingers inward and then stretches them out before laying her palms against his chest. And then, to Laurie’s bewilderment, she uses them to push him away.

He searches her face, trying to understand - is she embarrassed that the men walking down the street may have seen them feeling each other up in a public place? Her pupils are blown out, her eyes darkened by desire, but there’s something frozen about them too, in the way they’ve gone wide with alarm.

“I can’t do this,” she breathes, and she pushes away from the building, her arm brushing Laurie’s roughly as she moves back onto the street and sets a swift pace in the direction of their hotel.

Laurie stays still for a few seconds, fixed to the spot by his surprise, and then turns on his heel and hurries to catch up with her. “Amy,” he says, reaching for her arm.

She side-steps away from his touch, her eyes anchored ahead of her. “We can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, his eyebrows drawing together. “Hey, wait - ”

She whirls on him then, the frozen look in her eyes giving way to a stormy glare. “ _We can’t do this_ ,” she says again, with such vehemence that Laurie doesn’t try to speak to her again for the remaining two blocks between them and the hotel.

He waits until they’re in the elevator, Amy pressed into a corner, as far from him as she can possibly get, to ask, in what he hopes is a reasonable voice, “What’s wrong? What did I do wrong?”

For a moment he thinks she’s not going to reply, then an ounce of tension seems to ease out of her shoulders and she says, sounding tired, “You… didn’t. Or at least, I did, too. It was a mistake.”

A jolt of hurt runs through him, leaving his chest feeling raw. “You don’t mean that,” he says softly, following her out of the elevator. It comes out sounding like a question.

“I do,” she says firmly.

He takes a couple long strides so that he passes her and can turn around and face her, stopping her in her tracks. “Ames,” he says. He lifts a hand cautiously, brings it to her cheek. They’re both motionless for an instant, then she turns her face into his touch, and he’s about to breathe a sigh of relief when her mouth twists into a sad shape and she puts a hand on his wrist to move his hand away.

“I have to get out here,” she says, more to herself than to him, and steps around him to open the door to their room.

“What does _that_ mean?” Laurie asks as he follows her inside. He watches in disbelief as she moves around the room, collecting things: her pyjamas, her toiletry bag, dresses wrinkled in balls on the floor. She opens her suitcase and begins to throw her belongings in haphazardly. “Amy…”

“I’m going back to Zurich.”

“What - _now_? It’s late.” He gapes at her and says, urgently, “You don’t have a train ticket. There might not even _be_ a train at this hour. Amy - Amy, _stop_ ,” he says with a shade of desperation, reaching out and grasping one of her wrists to still her movements.

“No, _you_ stop,” she says hotly, wrenching her wrist from his hold and taking several steps back. “You’re - ” Her eyes are swimming with tears, bright green behind the sheen of moisture. “You’re being _mean_ ,” she tells him, and the pain in her voice is pulled taut and juvenile, like it’s been held at the base of her throat for years and years.

“What - how am I being mean?” Laurie asks, taken aback. “Amy, please,” he says as her eyes overflow, tears tumbling out so violently that they barely brush her cheeks, rushing through the air, disappearing when they hit the floor. “I didn’t mean to make you… uncomfortable, I swear I - ”

“ _Stop_ it,” she says sharply. “I won’t do this, Laurie. I won’t. You’re in love with my sister.”

“No,” he says, wondering abruptly if she’s refusing him, if she’s running away, out of a sense of sisterhood. “No, it’s been years - ”

“And have you had a girlfriend since?” Amy cuts in, crossing her arms over her chest like she needs to protect herself from him. “You’ve loved Jo since the moment you met her. And I - ” Her jaw tightens as she looks down at her feet. “I’ve lived in Jo’s shadow my _entire_ life. I won’t be your rebound, your - your consolation prize, since you couldn’t get the sister you really wanted. I won’t _do_ it, not when - ” She turns away from him, pressing her hands to her flushed cheeks for a beat before she looks at him again, defiance mingling with heartache in her shining eyes. “Not when I’ve loved you for so long,” she says in a voice stretched thin, and then she rushes to the washroom and slams the door behind her.

Laurie stands in the middle of the hotel room, staring at Amy’s half-packed bag, at the spot she was just standing in, at the sparkle of city lights just beyond the windows, and struggles to think of anything but Amy at twelve with the skirt of her elaborate royal costume clutched in both hands, Amy at fourteen shrieking with both vexation and joy when he smeared icing from her birthday cake across her nose, Amy at seventeen, the summer after he graduated, slipping a sketch of him in a director’s chair into the pocket of his raincoat, Amy at nineteen, last Christmas, tipping her head back against his knee and laughing at his lame joke, AmyAmyAmy, in years upon years of his life.

He’s still sitting on the edge of the bed, where he’d found himself after Amy closed the bathroom door between them, when she emerges again nearly an hour later. She looks wary and exhausted.

“You were right,” she says, leaning against the door frame, her shoulders hitched up toward her ears, her posture defensive. “There’s not another train til morning.”

Laurie nods. He wants to get up and put his arms around her, rub her back and kiss her forehead and tell her she’s worth a million times more than the idiot who’s upset her, and he would, if not for the fact that he’s the idiot. “Did you buy a ticket?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, her voice muted.

He sighs and stands up. His body feels tired and heavy, from the long day of walking, from the exhilaration of kissing her, from the weight of her revelation and the density of his own contrition. “Amy… I’d like to talk about this.”

Her lips press into each other until they go white. “I wouldn’t,” she says, quietly but with potency, and Laurie sees, suddenly, in the tightness of her mouth and the torment in her eyes, what he’s asking of her. He sees what the conversation he wants to have would do to her, the way it would tug apart threads she’s tied up so tightly and tucked away somewhere deep and untouchable inside of herself, how it would be forcing her to unlace herself and come undone, right here, right in front of him. When she adds, “Please,” in that same leaden voice, he can do nothing but relent.

“Do you want me to get another room? You can sleep here and I’ll…”

“What? No, no. Just…” She shrugs. “Stay on your side of the bed.”

“Okay,” he agrees, though thus far that’s proven to be an unattainable goal.

“Okay,” Amy murmurs. She digs through her bag for her pyjamas and returns to the bathroom to change.

While she’s gone, Laurie sinks back down onto the bed and asks himself, sincerely, if he's somehow managed to misunderstand himself, if he’s truly still in love with a woman who’s never loved him back. But it feels legitimately impossible to even think about Jo when his mouth still tastes like Amy, and when he thinks about the gasp he drew out of her and the way it reverberated through his own body. Perhaps he’s guarded his heart a bit too well since Jo, but he definitely didn’t leave it with her. It’s where it belongs, in his chest, and it seizes painfully when Amy exits the bathroom in her little cotton shorts, her hair in two messy braids he’s not allowed to touch.

Laurie sleeps in his clothes, too worn out to even contemplate changing. He wakes frequently, jerking out of sleep to find that his body has started to inch toward Amy’s, and dragging himself away again. He watches her back in the dark. Her breaths seem too shallow for a person who’s truly asleep.

Eventually, he wakes up to find light sneaking into the room through the gap between the heavy curtains, and Amy halfway to the door. “Ames,” he says as he pushes himself into a sitting position. He tries not to sound frantic and fails.

It seems like she doesn’t want to turn back to look at him, but she does. Her makeup doesn’t quite hide the blotchiness to her skin that comes from crying. He’s never seen her eyes look so old.

Laurie sighs, his neck aching from his fitful sleep, and opens his mouth to ask her to stay.

Amy shakes her head before he even gets the word out, like she knows what he’ll ask and can’t bear to hear it. “Safe travels, Laurie,” she says.

And she goes.

He lays in bed for long enough after she’s left that he eventually falls asleep, a deep sleep this time, one that he sinks into and doesn’t particularly wish to leave. It’s mid-afternoon by the time he’s forced out of it, his body apparently having garnered all the rest it needs. He’s moved to Amy’s side of the bed, as has become his habit of late. Her pillow smells like almonds and honeysuckle.

Laurie rubs his eyes, picks up the house phone, and orders a bottle of wine. He drinks the whole thing before he falls asleep again in the evening.

The next day, he wakes up at a more reasonable hour with a dry mouth and a pounding head. He orders breakfast and stares at his messaging history with Amy while he eats. He wants to ask if she made it back to Zurich safely, but he’s worried she’d ignore him.

Their conversation history is brief, consisting of only a few messages exchanged while they were in Switzerland. There’s been no need to text her since - they’ve spent every day together.

He closes WhatsApp and open up Notes, where his burgeoning thoughts for a new screenplay stare back at him. He thinks of the way Amy bites her lip when she’s trying not to smile and imagines his heroine doing the same thing, distrustful of her own delight. He thinks of Amy on the roof of the Duomo, peering upward, and imagines what she must’ve looked like to others, gazing right up into the clouds.

A pen emblazoned with the name of the hotel ends up in his hand. He rifles through the drawer of the desk and pulls out a notepad, and he starts to write.

_FADE IN:_

_INT. - TRAIN - LATE AFTERNOON_

_European countryside is speeding past the windows. Our view is partially blocked by our heroine, whose face is turned to the landscape._

_C/U on her reflection in the glass. Her expression is neutral, hard to read. Trees and fields rush through her face. She bites her lip._

Two hours and a cramped hand later, he flops back onto the bed on his back. He needs to shower, and shave, but those feel like insurmountable tasks, things he can’t manage to do considering the way his mind is racing. He can’t just forget these last few days with Amy, can’t forget how they made him feel. He can’t ignore the way she made him want to write again, for the first time in months, with all the things she said with her face that he craves to put into words, with the ferocity of the way she’d spoken to him about trying, about wanting to be great.

Amy made him feel like he had roots, and to his complete amazement, he’d liked it. He hadn’t been forced to put them down anywhere, but he’d had them, and he was happy to. He felt rooted to _her_ , to the pattern of her breathing on the other side of the bed, to the way her sunglasses were always falling from their perch atop her head and he was always collecting them from the ground.

He’s supposed to leave for Naples in two days, but he doesn’t think he can.

His roots won’t let him.

He drinks his coffee by the window on his third full day without her. He doesn’t finish it - the remainder feels like it’s meant to be delivered into Amy’s waiting hands, its bitterness creating a wrinkle in her nose.

Tomorrow, he’s supposed to get on a train heading south, so he packs up his things, burying the shirt Amy wore the day they went to see the The Last Supper beneath all his other clothes. He rips thirteen pages of his writing off the hotel notepad and folds them carefully into thirds, tucks them into one of the slots in his bag meant for shoes.

Laurie’s wanted to get away, to get _out_ , for so many days of life that he doesn’t know if he’s ever felt like this before. Like he wants to be somewhere that his feet and limbs and soul recognize. Like he wants to be somewhere he’s known. Like he wants to go home.

He buys a ticket to go north instead of south. The clerk at the hotel in Naples explains to him, sounding peeved, that he’s past the deadline to get a refund on his hotel room if he cancels it now. He does it anyway.

He can’t fall asleep in his hotel room in Zurich. He leans over the balcony’s rail and stares into the calm waters of the Limmat. He wants, so badly that his stomach hurts, to tell Amy to keep painting that river, to tell her he knows she can get it right.

He can only guess what a workout Jo’s eyes would get with all the rolling they’d do if she knew what he was doing. _You like beautiful things too much,_ she’d told him once when she was frustrated with him. He’d been offended - _what’s wrong with that?_ \- and he had absolutely no way to know that he’d look at her youngest sister one day, sweaty and awed and overcome, and find her to be beautiful beyond his wildest imaginings.

It was only days ago, really, that Laurie went to sleep in large, lonely hotel beds by himself just as easily as he’d ever fallen asleep in the equally large, equally empty beds of his childhood, in the twin bed in his dorm at Bennington, on the mattress on the floor in his Brooklyn studio that he’s convinced himself is a minimalist choice.

Now, his ears wait for a creak in the bed springs, for the murmur of a conversation in a dream, for the rustle of sheets.

He never knew, before, that it was possible to be kept awake by silence.

The following afternoon, freshly showered and wearing clothes he’d had laundered the previous day, he sets out for Amy’s guest haus, forging a path from the memory of the evening she agreed to go to Italy with him and he walked her home.

The woman who greets him clearly wears many hats; there is flour on one of her cheeks and a kitchen towel over her shoulder. In a mixture of German, English, and hand signals, he manages to ask for Amy’s room, and she tells him Amy’s not there. “Der Unterricht,” she says, which Laurie guesses to mean that Amy’s at school.

He thanks her and goes outside with his hands in his pockets, not quite sure what to do. He could try and leave a note. He could leave and come back in the evening, when Amy’s more likely to be in her room. Or he could sit down on the steps he’s currently standing on and wait for a while, in case she comes back soon.

He chooses the last option, settling in on the second-to-last step, off to one side so there’s still room for anyone coming or going to move past him. He watches pedestrians for a while, listens to conversations in German that he can’t parse. A couple women in their twenties give him inquisitive looks.

Eventually he takes out his phone, opens his Notes app, and sets his mind to attempting to create a cohesive plot for the second act of his screenplay. It feels reductive to have his heroine fall in love with anyone but the person she herself is becoming. It also feels lonesome.

“Laurie?”

His head flies up, and he finds Amy standing two feet in front of him, in that coral dress with the paint splattered across one side, a backpack slung over her shoulder. He gets to his feet, shoving his phone into his back pocket. “Hey.”

“What are you doing here?” she asks, fingers tightening around the strap of her backpack until her knuckles turn white. “You’re supposed to be in Naples. Is something wrong? Is it your grandfather?”

“No,” he says quickly. It strikes him, briefly but poignantly, that if he’d come to her with a problem she would have put what happened between them aside, helped him in whatever way she could. “No, everything’s fine, I just - I couldn’t go to Naples. I had to see you.”

Her lips press together; he can tell she’s annoyed with him. He stays still as she walks up the first couple steps, as if she intends to go inside and leave him where he stands. “Laurie, I told you - ”

“I know.” He turns so that he’s facing her fully. With him on the sidewalk and her on the steps, they’re nearly at eye level. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. I respect that. But if I want to talk, will you listen?”

She sighs, her brows cinching together. After a drawn out moment, the creases smooth out of her forehead and some of the tension seeps out of her posture. “Fine,” she says.

Laurie nods, takes a breath, and presses his sweaty palms against his shorts. It seems almost absurd that Amy could make him so nervous, Amy who has always acted like her wildest self around him, Amy who whined to her parents and tattled on her sisters in his presence, but she does. His heart keeps slamming against his ribs.

“The days we spent together,” he says, “weren’t like anything that I’ve ever experienced before. You saw me, Amy, and you heard me - and maybe you have for a while and I never noticed, but I have noticed, now. And you… you fought me on the things I needed to be fought on. And I could be wrong, but I swear I saw you, too. That day at Santa Maria, when we saw saw The Last Supper - I looked at you looking at that painting and I _saw_ you, and you were so beautiful. You _are_ so beautiful, and I don’t just mean how you look, I mean all of you.” He studies Amy’s hand, still closed so tightly around the strap of her bag, and her face, shuttered with doubt. “That girl I saw and heard, I loved her.” He exhales slowly, his breath faltering in stops and starts. “So help me,” he finally says, looking into her eyes, “I think I’m in love with her.”

Amy’s lips part, just slightly, and Laurie thinks of the soft surrender of her mouth against his, of her peach-flavoured lip balm. “No,” she says, so quietly he barely hears her. “No, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes _complete_ sense,” he insists, moving closer to the steps but not daring to lift a foot onto them. “And it has nothing to do with Jo - please believe that, Amy, because it’s true. It has nothing to do with Jo and _everything_ to do with you.” He tells her what still feels like a revelation to him, a discovery that blinded him with its lucidity when he finally got around to making it: “You make sense to me. Maybe more than anything else in the world. Being with you makes sense.”

Her eyes are wide, bursts of gold in the green of her irises. She looks at him for a long, long moment, her eyes flickering over his face, baffled, emboldened, marveling. Her conclusion, when she finally gives it to him, is, “You want to kiss me.”

One corner of Laurie’s mouth twitches upward, his heart drumming away at breakneck speed. “Desperately,” he confirms.

Her eyes are still moving over his face, catching briefly on his mouth before their gazes meet, again. There’s something unsure in her expression, but also something precious, broken open for him to see. “Say that again,” she says softly.

Laurie moves closer, still, so that his toes are jammed against the bottom stair. “Amy March,” he says, his smile starting to form again, not stopping this time, “I desperately want to kiss you.”

Amy’s chin is raised with that old bossy regality of hers, and her voice is lofty despite the vibration of emotion running through it as she says, “Well. Go ahe - ”

The rest of her word, along with her gentle gasp of surprise, are muffled against Laurie’s mouth as he wraps his arms around her and presses his mouth to hers. Her bag falls onto the steps and her arms slip around his neck and she makes three quiet sounds in her throat that might mean _I love you_ , but he doesn’t bother to break the kiss to get clarity. He’ll pester her about it later, ask her to say those words aloud. He might even try, if he can convince her to be whisked away for a weekend sometime soon, to extract those four letters from her with his fingers tickling her ribcage, to persuade her to yell them on a peak in the Alps. He hopes he’ll have a chance to hear her whisper them to him at the summer’s end, in the lineup to pass through security at the airport, when her sunglasses fall off her head and he picks them up for the thousandth time.

But for now, Amy’s chest pressing into his, her fingers twisting into his hair - there’s nothing else for Laurie to want, and nowhere else for him to wish to be.

_and in the morning when i’m waking up_  
_i swear that you’re the first thing that i’m thinkin’ of_  
_i feel it in my body, know it in my mind_  
_oh i, i’m gonna love you for a long time_

fin.


End file.
